Nonfiction/Fiction.

Enduring Spirits

N. Scott Momaday Reconstructs The Kiowa Story By Remembering His Own

January 19, 1997|By Charles Wasserburg. Charles Wasserburg teaches in the English department at Northwestern University. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications.

The Way to Rainy Mountain

By N. Scott Momaday

University of Arizona Press, 89 pages, $24.95

The Names

By N. Scott Momaday

University of Arizona Press, 170 pages, $29.95

N. Scott Momaday has devoted his career to reconstructing his people, the Kiowa Indians, marrying fragments of myth and history into a coherent and humane narrative that embodies tragedy, stoicism and reverence for the earth's miraculous beauty.

The historical facts about the Kiowa lie scattered before us like bleached vertebrae: About the time of the Revolutionary War, a tribe of native hunters descends from the high country in western Montana and is befriended by the Crow Indians, who give them horses and the Sacred Sun Dance. For close to a century, the Kiowa, as the tribe comes to be called, are allied with the Comanches and rule the southern plains. Then, in 1887, they hold what becomes their final Sun Dance; with the buffalo that are central to the ritual nearly wiped out, the Kiowa can find none to complete it. Instead, they hang an old hide from their sacred tree. But before the dance begins, a company of white soldiers from a nearby fort breaks up the ritual. The tribe is diminished and dispersed.

Among those present at that 1887 incident was a 7-year-old girl named Aho, the grandmother of N. Scott Momaday, Stanford Ph.D. and professor at the University of Arizona (the N. is for Natachee, his mother's name). The University of Arizona Press has reissued two of Momaday's works of nonfiction along with "House Made of Dawn," the novel that garnered him a Pulitzer Prize and cemented his reputation in 1969; in doing so, the press gives us a more complete view of his remarkable process of reconstruction and remembrance.

While Momaday's subject matter and background may pigeonhole him, he proves slippery to label as an artist. Adept in poetry, the novel, the memoir and scholarly excursus, he has also exhibited his paintings, and he is as at home with Native American folk tales as he is with American and English literature (he has, for example, edited a valuable edition of the great 19th Century American poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman).

Momaday's two autobiographical writings, "The Way to Rainy Mountain" and "The Names," first appeared more than 20 years ago, before the current marketplace boom in memoir. But these books display none of the current mania for authorial self-disclosure. Unlike many late-20th Century autobiographers, Momaday is most intrigued by the actual processes by which life stories are created.

A moment at the beginning of "Rainy Mountain" helps articulate Momaday's method of recovery. One night, lying in bed at home in Oklahoma, where he has returned to visit his grandmother's grave, Momaday sees a cricket perched on a handrail a few inches from his face. "My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil," he writes. "It had gone there, I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal." Again and again throughout the memoir, Momaday discovers these shifts in perspective that momentarily align human beings with nature, the historical moment with eternity, and make our "small definition" whole and eternal.

Of the two books, "Rainy Mountain" has more consistent lyrical power and visionary grandeur. Momaday's prose has a majesty that perfectly embodies his subject, and this derives from his frequent and deliberate use of a verb that in less-capable hands would result in inert prose: "to be." As Momaday uses it, the verb contains his theme of the eternal presence of landscape and history, as an acorn contains an oak: "Loneliness is an aspect of the land," he writes of his native Oklahoma plains. "All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man." It is that sense of stateliness and durability that gives his prose such physical presence.

Both books enact journeys toward origin, and, in the circularity of many self-discoveries, both end at their beginnings, as the author reconsiders what he has found. Both also draw on a variety of writing styles to tackle their subjects. "Rainy Mountain" uses paragraph-long bursts of folk stories, then, on each facing page, adds a historical or an anthropological reading of the incident, which is itself followed by Momaday's explicitly personal memory of a person or place. As the book progresses to its final page and a poem about Rainy Mountain cemetery, these passages build upon each other with the condensed, associative power of poetry. "The Names" draws on the memoirist's crystalline prose, snatches of nearly disembodied dialogue, passages of stream-of-consciousness narrative, and even photographs from the author's collection to round out his family portrait.